Spinal CT–guided Interventional Procedures for Management of Chronic Back Pain

Ultrasound Guidance for Interventional Pain Management of Lumbar Facet Joint Pain: An Anatomical and Clinical Study

“…Most pain practitioners are largely used for facet joint injections. Also, when injections are performed under imaging guidance, complication rates are decreased and better outcomes are obtained (24,29). Thus, the use of preciseness and safety equipment, such as ultrasound without radiation, have been highly requested.…”

“…Early trials failed to show improvements using facet joint injections with steroids. However, recent studies identified good outcome treatments with steroid injections (24,25). Despite the suspicion surrounding steroid actions, some studies have subscribed to this treatment for clinical pain symptoms in their practices (26,27).…”

Applied Radiologic Science in the Treatment of Pain: Interventional Pain Medicine

“…In the 1990s conventional-CT guidance began to be used by interventionally-trained pain physicians for chronic benign spinal pain (Aguirre et al, 2005;Gangi et al, 1998). During this period, algorithms were also developed to establish CT-fluoroscopy, which introduced a real-time feature to this modality (Daly & Templeton, 1999).…”

CT-Guided Lumbar Nerve Root Injections: Are We Using the Correct Radiation Dose Settings?

“…The technique for performing CT fluoroscopy-guided SNRB has been previously described in the literature. 4,6,8 Three CT images were obtained each time the radiologist stepped on the CT fluoroscopy pedal and each image was equivalent to 0.33 seconds of exposure time (total 1 second).…”

“…As a result, there is wide variability in the reported tube current settings for lumbar spine CT fluoroscopy procedures. [3][4][5][6][7] The aim of this study was to compare the tube current selection and fluoroscopy time of different proceduralists for lumbar spine SNRB in our practice. We sought to learn the variability in tube current to help us form strategies for optimizing CT fluoroscopy utility, while keeping radiation dose as low as reasonably achievable.…”